Osip Mandelstam Russia

Osip Mandelstam is regarded as one of the greatest poets
in the Russian language. He was born on 14 January 1891 in
Warsaw, the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. The family
moved to St. Petersburg when he was still a child and he
attended the prestigious Tenishev School. He studied in France
and Germany and converted to Christianity on his return to
Russia, enabling him to enrol in the University of St. Petersburg.

The first edition of Mandelstam’s first collection of poems,
Stone, in 1913, established him as a leading poet. Together with
a small group of poets, especially Anna Akhmatova, he formed
a poetic school known as the Acmeists.

Mandelstam began a series of wanderings around the time
of the October Revolution of 1917 in Ukraine, Crimea and
Georgia. He met his soon-to-be-wife Nadezhda Khazina in
Kyiv in 1919. This was the period in which the poems of Tristia
were written, which were published as a collection in 1922 in
Berlin.

Increasingly at odds with the Stalin regime, Mandelstam
was arrested for the first time in 1934. He and his wife were
sent into internal exile in the city of Voronezh. He was arrested
again in 1938 and died seven months later of sickness in a
transit camp near Vladivostok. His widow Nadezhda managed
to preserve his later verse, which was not published in full in
Russia until the 1980s.

(2022)